My suggestion was to merge the AHs cross server, with the aim of making the economies more stable. At the moment, prices fluctuate wildly. If the AHs were one, like in other mmos, there wouldn't be shortages, and prices would be based on the attributes and rarity of the items instead of seemingly random arbitrary prices set due to convention.

Take for example Utsusemi scrolls. Every server has exactly the same means to get them in the first place, yet they vary in price by hundreds of thousands of gil. The effects of server population and the amount of aspiring ninja on the price are displaced somewhat by prices that have been fixed by convention.

if you want scrolls to be cheaper you're welcome to farm them yourself and sell them at a lower price.

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lolgaxe wrote:

When it comes to sitting around not doing anything for long periods of time, only being active for short windows, and marginal changes and sidegrades I'd say FFXI players were the perfect choice for politicians.

The problem with this though is that, even though the prices may vary wildly on different servers, they're likely the same when you take into account the value of gil on the servers.

Likewise, having the AHs linked across servers would be problematic, because what if one of the servers went down for some reason? There could go X number of items right there because that server's auction house is no longer accessible for as long as the server's down. The entire supply of an item might just poof away briefly as a result.

Most importantly though, people are going to inflate or gouge prices no matter what. They could simply keep the rare and valuable stuff in bazaars rather than put it up on the AH to keep the prices high on that server rather than take the gil hit and put it up on the auction houses.

buying and selling of stuff on a central auction house server would still be there as far as tranactions go even if a world goes down. If this were the case if a world (or multiple worlds for that matter) goes down, then the central server would hold back those items being sold (not already sold) until the worlds become available again. It's not impossible.